There’s more great material on Russia in the latest issue of the New Statesman that I can possibly fit in here. In a brief comment piece, Lilia Shevtsova argues that the Putinist authoritarian drift has provoked a number of fundamental paradoxes: the electoral process is being instrumentalized to undermine democracy itself, after years of building up the power of the presidency Putin will now have to weaken it, the heavy handed efforts to create stability in the process has actually generated instability, and how the elites simultaneously want to be incorporated with the West while isolating Russian society from it. It’s an elegantly argued piece.